Reading: LONG WAY DOWN: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL - Jason Reynolds (author), Danica Novgorodoff (illustrator)

Prose (Story): This graphic novel, adapted from the award-winning novel by author Jason Reynolds (this time working with illustrator Danica Novgorodoff), follows fifteen-year-old Will who - as the story opens - has just lost his older brother Shawn to a gang shooting, an all-too familiar hazard where Will is from. In shock and grief, only made worse by the devastating toll Shawn's death is having on their mother, Will nevertheless remembers The Rules, passed onto him as a child by his brother - No Crying. No Snitching. Get Revenge - and is determined to live by them. Breaking into a drawer in Shawn's dresser that Will had alway been forbidden access to, the young man finds his dead brother's gun and, sure of who Shawn's killer is, sets out avenge his brother - little realizing that an act as simple as getting in an elevator and pressing the down button could prove to have reverberating effects on his life and future. Maybe even save it. 

Don's (Review):  I read Jason Reynold's moving, heartbreaking and deeply profound novel about a year ago, unable for weeks to shake its effect on me (to this day, remembering it sends me back to the dream-like state that overcomes you when reading it). Told in free verse as opposed to a straight narrative made the novel all that much more powerful, putting the reader into Will's head from his first words, but I did wonder how that writing style would work in this form. Sure enough, the book's narrative has been changed up a bit to accommodate the graphic novel, but the words are no less powerful - the story no less sugar-coated in the face of reality - and illustrator Danica Novgorodoff's choice of watercolors, blues and reds and purples runing and smearing into each other over beautiful line drawings that capture the mood of life in the city, the devastation of life where Will and his family live in particular, give the words and story a whole other level of visual impact beyond the novel. While the novel remains my favorite, its mark left permanently on my soul just by reading it, the graphic novel is no less brilliant, and no less a must-read. Not so much a companion piece, or even off-shoot of the book, this is more a gutwrenching visual representation of what it's like to live in Shawn and Will's world - if you're allowed to live in it at all.  5/5 stars